Increase Your Website Traffic: 17 Insanely Effective Tips

The holy grail of the internet is driving free traffic to your website that actually converts.

But really, do you know how to do it?

If you’re like the millions of other website owners in the world, the question “How do I increase traffic to my website?” probably keeps you up more often than not.

In a poll by Problogger, 35% of website owners admit to getting less than 100 visitors a day (we can safely assume that number is closer to 50%). That’s less than three thousand unique people coming in a month for these websites.

Meaning 350 million webmasters could use a little help getting the traffic puzzle right.

There’s no way to build a viable business around that kind of foot traffic considering most websites have a conversion rate of fewer than 2%.

Simply put, we all need more free traffic.

If on the other hand, you think you have enough traffic visiting your website, offer pages, and opt-ins for your mailing list then this article isn’t for you. You should press the back button on your browser so you don’t waste the next ten minutes of your life.

Now that we’ve culled down the number of people in denial visiting this page, it’s time for me to give you those 17 super effective methods I promised you in the title.

Let’s get started.

Expert Round Ups and Interviews

I love experts, they give you unique insights they’ve amassed over years of trial and error. Whenever they speak, it’s in your best interest to listen.

Let’s look some of the ways you benefit from expert roundups.

You gain a lot of credibility by virtue of featuring them on your blog.

Some of them will link back to you and give you a boost in the SERPs (search engine rankings pages)

They’ll help you promote your website and bring you huge amounts of free referral traffic from their established channels.

Small Business Ideas Blog did a roundup on with over 40 experts chiming in to dispense wisdom about how to market your content. Thousands of shares

and a good amount of links as well.

Serped gathered the big guns who shared their best tips for getting a boost in search rankings.

and their links

Robbie Richards went further than everyone and compiled a list of 60 experts who know a thing or two about building mailing lists.

and the links

So how do you get all these super busy people to agree to being featured on your website?

Good question.

First, you need to identify people who’ve been featured in roundups before to make sure they’re into that kind of thing.

No one likes a spammer.

It’s as simple as performing a quick search in Google for something like keyword + experts.

This will show you different posts that have featured experts before. Use this information to compile a list of experts to reach out to.

There’s a simple template you can use to get a decent response rate and not annoy the person on the other end of the email.

Subject: What do you think?

Hey _____,

I’m doing a roundup of SEO experts to find out their favorite time saving SEO tools

As one of my favorite SEO experts I thought you’d like to share what you think and the tools you use.

If so, please reply with an answer to the following questions:

What 2 SEO tools save you the most time on a daily basis?

I know you’re busy so your response can be as long or as short as you like.

Make sure you keep track of the people you reached out to, because it’s very easy to lose it in the shuffle.

Open an excel sheet or Google doc that has the following info.

Now all you have to do is get to work on your epic roundup.

Become an active member of High traffic Forums

Sadly, this is an overlooked strategy for drumming up a never-ending source of targeted referral traffic. Just because this strategy’s been used for a while doesn’t mean it won’t get you high quality website traffic.

Every niche imaginable has a handful of high traffic forums; forums where you can flex your expert muscles and genuinely help people make a difference in their lives or business.

Let’s look at how to market yourself in forums without turning into a complete sleaze in the process.

The Warrior forum claims to be the largest internet marketing forum in the world. They cover almost every topic from getting more website traffic to marketing on Instagram. What they don’t tell you is how to market on forums.

Here’s how you do it.

DON’T MARKET YOURSELF.

When you’re a part of a forum, especially when you’re new, people take note of you and what you’re doing. Especially on a forum of marketing guys; they’re just waiting to pick you apart as some kind of fraud.

The first thing to do is make a signature that links to your optin page, website, or sales page.

As you’re probably well aware, this will follow you around every time you make a post. (some forums don’t allow you to create a signature until you’ve been a member for a while or have racked up a certain number of posts).

Use the search function available in all forums and take a look around for topics you know in and out to determine how often they’ve been asked and how good the answers are.

What you’re trying to figure out is if there’s anything you can expand on using your own unique perspective.

Once you find the popular topics you have a reasonable amount of expertise on; answer as many questions as humanly possible (please make sure you observe forum etiquette at all times so you don’t get blacklisted by other members).

Spend 15-30 minutes a day answering questions and adding value. This will allow the regular users to get familiar with you and start to accept you as a helpful member of their community.

After doing this for about two weeks, you should have a decent amount of posts (about 100), respect, and recognition in the forum to start your own thread. People should be clicking on your signature by now as well.

Now, you’re going to make an epic thread that goes into detail about the questions you’ve been answering.

Don’t hold back. Answer the question fully and don’t worry about the length. Answer just like one of your high-quality blog posts. Link out, include screenshots, and give any unique insights you have.

You’ll know you’ve arrived because people will start to link to your thread from within the forum as a resource. After that, your signature will see a huge amount of highly qualified referral traffic hitting it over and over again.

Write Longer Articles

The data proves it; the search engines love looong articles.

Long-form content has been gaining traction for many reasons.

Moz revealed a pretty convincing correlation between long form content and links and we know that links bring referral traffic. Win Win.

SerpIQ found that the majority of top ten ranking posts have 2000 words or more.

There’s a huge gap between both the length and the quality of the articles. (I want to point out “What is SEO” is a competitive search term and brands making articles like this are well aware. So the quality of articles is way higher than something like “construction company Birmingham” would be.)

Before you start writing three thousand words of filler content, remember you’re writing for humans.

If you write a three thousand word post of crap and happen to get ranked well by search engines in a low competition niche you’ll get more traffic.

But

That traffic will bounce as soon as it lands on your page. There’s no way to convert them to subscribers and customers like that.

A few rules of thumb for creating epic content.

Nobody wants three thousand words of your opinion.

Break the text up with relevant screen shots, video, and audio, to make It easy on the eyes while providing different ways to assimilate the information.

Include the sources of your information in case your visitors want to check out where the stats came from.

Do write like you talk, I’m not really fond of reading scholarly articles and I doubt your audience is either.

If the topic doesn’t need three thousand words then don’t use three thousand words. No one needs more filler content; the internet is already clogged with it.

Always remember the kinds of mediums your audience like to consume content.

Increase your website traffic by Paying Special Attention to Headlines/Titles

We live in an age of skimmers, nobody reads anything online without scanning a page to see how long an article is and whether there are any headings that jump off the screen.

Now that you’ve got headline writing down and can pop out some awesome ones at the drop of a hat, it’s time to give you some software that’ll help you cheat when you’re feeling lazy.

4 Headline tools

Coschedule has a headline analyzer tool that helps you grade your headlines based on a number of criteria such as common words, uncommon words, power words, emotional words, and length.

I scored a 69 and had a few positives as well.

Advanced Marketing Institute has a really neat tool. It gives your title an EMV score and then lets you know how you stack up against professional copywriters. It also classifies your headline. Mine is classed as intellectual (I know, it shines through in my writing).

Portent takes a different approach, they let you start with a seed keyword then help you generate some interesting ideas.

Answer the Public. This one doesn’t exactly help you craft an amazing headline , but it gives you some content ideas you can then expand on. Plus it’s worth it to see the old man moving around in the background. (he’s the seeker).

Have an Opinion

In number three, I asked you not to write a three thousand words of your opinion.

Don’t mistake that for not having an opinion in the first place. If you really want your website traffic to increase then you need more than facts to get people to come back time and time again.

Anyone can get facts, but only you have your unique perspective you use to interpret those facts.

I believe in experimenting like there’s no tomorrow.

I think conventional wisdom is for bitches.

And my subscribers are all scientists participating in a grand experiment with me in order to dominate in their respective niches.

Mark Manson receives over one million visitors every month and barely posts updates to his blog. It’s not because he spends tens of thousands on advertising.

It’s because he inspires emotions in his readers every time he publishes a post.

There’s a post he wrote a few months ago, In defense of being average where he shows people it’s ok to be average in most things and only excel in a few.

Even if you’re in a boring niche like stock analysis, there’s always a way to spice it up.

We’re built to root for a hero or sometimes it can even be the villain. The only thing we need and want is something that can make us feel.

I remember sitting in a special room that blocks of something like 90% of sound coming from the outside world. After a while, I started hearing my heartbeat and the voices in my head threatened to take over my sanity.

In those moments, I wanted any sound to let me know I wasn’t alone.

It’s the same thing with your readers, they’ve been bored to death online and it’s up to you to restore their sanity.

Let them feel something and you’ve gotten a lifelong stream of visitors.

(quick tip: Tell stories, we all love them).

Take advantage of User Generated Content.

You don’t have to take on the world alone. You can get your audience or other bloggers to participate in a challenge or contest to drive tons of engagement and interest in your website.

Burberry is the perfect example of leveraging the power of your customers. They transformed from an old world staple to a modern essential with user generated content.

Art of the Trench was the campaign they used to launch their new face in 2009. Professional fashion photographers hit the streets to photograph stylish people wearing a Burberry trench.

Customers could also upload their own photos to the site where other visitors could like and share their favorites.

How to get people to create user generated content

Contests

Contests work well for user generated content because you’re able to give a prize away for the best submission. What could be easier?

You can skip to tip 13 to learn more about how to use contests for generating website traffic.

Nikon has held an annual contest for over 30 years. The Nikon Photo Contest challenges photographers and filmmakers around the world to generate the most compelling stories they can using imagery

Job Opportunities

For the chance to land a high paying job, 40,000 people from hundreds of countries submitted videos to the Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World” campaign.

Six lucky winners who submitted the best explainer video were given the opportunity to work in Australia for six months and earn a salary of up to $150,000 during that period.

Ben Southall was one of the lucky winners who landed the job of an Island caretaker. Blogging, beaches, and a decent pay; what could be better?

The Search for Perfection

TedxPortland developed a unique way to generate buzz and get their fans involved in the promotion of the upcoming event.

They worked with the Instrument agency to develop an app that overlaid the word perfect on user pictures and uploaded them to twitter and Instagram.

The photos generated a huge buzz because everyone wanted to know what perfect photos were.

To top it all off, the Ted organizers put all the pictures on an 80 foot tall stage to show the world and the participants their handwork.

Don’t stop believing

Key Takeaway: Your audience wants to be a part of your community, give them the opportunity to do just that in the most creative way possible.

Join Blogging Communities to get exposure to hundreds of thousands of new people.

Blogging communities are a great way to meet your fellow webmasters. Share tips, find guest posting opportunities, build relationships, collaborate, and anything else you can think of. All these together bring us back to our goal, increased website traffic.

There’s a subtle art to getting the most out of the different blogging communities out there. You can be an asshole or you can be an all-star.

How to Get free traffic From Blogging Communities

Blogging communities are just like other online communities. Your chief aim is to help out the other members as much as you can.

If you go into the forum with that thought, “how many people can I help achieve their goals today” then you’ve already won.

It’s just like using forums in Number 2, but the emphasis is on contributing and sharing content instead of only dispensing sage wisdom.

A neat fringe benefit of a social media presence is a boost in organic traffic and having evangelists share your content all around the web.

Go out and do commenting spam

Not actually, I want you to go out and participate in your niche. There’s been a lot of debate (commenting debate) about whether or not commenting has any real value.

Does it drive website traffic, sales, and conversions?

If not then why bother?

Well, I’m here to let you know that commenting does all of the above.

You know what the real problem is?

People leaving comments like this “nice post, thanks for sharing.”

Really? Is that all you could give me after reading my 5,000 word post?

A comment that drives free traffic to your website is thoughtful, contributes to the discussion, and expresses a unique perspective.

Neil Patel did a short case study and was able to drive over two thousand visitors to his website using less than three hundred comments. The icing on the cake was when he was able use one of those comments to land a $25,000 speaking engagement.

Bryan Harris saw a direct correlation between people that commented on his posts and bought his products.

Flaunt my Design reigned in over 2,000 visitors with a few well-placed comments that added value to the discussion.

Contribute to the discussion and give new insights and perspectives on the original content

Remember Quora and you’ll win the traffic lottery

Quora is one of those high traffic sites where people get together to share knowledge with each other.

Barack Obama used Quora to talk about the Iran Nuclear Deal in late-2015 and has generated over a quarter million views since then.

Hillary Clinton also used it recently as a place to clear the air on her political stance. Each one of her questions generated about one million views each with the total exposure being close to four million views.

Popular answers can get hundreds of thousands or even millions of views within a few short days and people have piggybacked off their popularity on Quora to launch successful businesses.

But how do you Use Quora promote your website and get free traffic?

Start with a Hook

Since millions of people read and write on Quora, you’re always going to be fighting for recognition. Catch their attention with an amazing hook. Here’s the hook of one of the most read answers on quora. “I’ll answer your question, but first I need to explain all of human civilization in two minutes with the aid of a snake.”

Pull them down the slippery slope

A good hook sets your reader up for a good answer. Use images, quotes, other media, and reference sources whenever possible.

Understand the question

Someone may ask “why don’t girls like me?” What they’re really asking is “how do I make myself more attractive to the opposite sex?”

Answer a lot of questions really well to build a following

If you do this, take Quora as a second blog, you’ll start to get traction and that traction will turn into visitors for your website. In addition to that, you’re building your personal/business brand.

Reach Out to Universities

This one works best if you have a product or service for sale. Universities are moving with the times and offer pretty much any course you can imagine.

Everything from creative dance and fitness to pottery and weaving is represented these days. If you’re in a niche then a university is teaching a class on the subject.

Now, how do you get Universities to send you website traffic?

There’s a free method and a pay to play method.

Since this is a post about free website traffic, I’m not going to include the pay to play method.

Assuming you have a product for sale. Ebooks, online courses, software, or even a membership site all work well for this. Contact the relevant staff member at the university and pitch your product to them at a discount for staff and students alike.

If they accept (which they almost always do because who hates discounts?) they’ll add your landing page to their university discounts section.

You get high quality referral traffic, a coveted .edu backlink, and a super high impact brand partner.

It allows you to automate the entire process and your entrants get a referral link so the more people they add, the better their chances of winning.

That’s why apps like KingSumo give you an advantage.

AppSumo generated

Josh Earl increased his list size to 200,000 people when he gave away a free license to Sublime Text 3 to people that really needed/wanted it.

You can do the same or even more by giving away something people actually find valuable and using a social contest plugin like Kingsumo

Develop a Compelling Brand Story

A brand story is something that sets great companies apart from mediocre companies. The let visitors connect with you and make them want to share whatever you’re doing. A brand story is something that sets great companies apart from mediocre companies. They let visitors connect with you and make them want to share whatever you’re doing.

Steve Jobs was pushed out of his own company and sat idly by for years until he was invited back to revive Apple.

When he came back, he slashed almost all the products they were creating and concentrated on a few with the most potential. He’s well known for being a jackass and a branding guru.

His story is legendary and Apple is one of the strongest and most recognizable consumer brands in existence today.

But what about the third generation mom and pop store owner?

How do you feel when you go into their store to patronize them? When I visit John and Keisha down the street from my house to buy something, I know I’m part of something bigger than the milk I just bought.

You know you’re helping a friend move closer to their goals and at the same time, you’re getting more than your values worth.

A brand story does more than get you free traffic, it produces evangelists.

There are some key elements that every good brand story has, but first, let’s look at some brands that have taken the time to communicate their amazing stories.

Make a list of potential brand partners you can reach out to. Take into consideration their online presence, the size of their email list, their audience mix, and level of engagement.

Equipped with this information, reach out to all the companies on your list and see if any of them would be interested in launching a co-branded campaign with you.

Make it clear you would like to partner on an infograhic, video, ebook, webinar, blog post, etc. You can also use this opportunity to pitch them a few killer ideas.

Execute quickly and move ahead with anyone that shows interest. Divide the work and split the cost down the middle. Put together a comprehensive promotion plan; check all the boxes on the content, publish it, and promote it like there’s no tomorrow.

(Courtesy 100 Days of Growth)

Learn the Art of Copywriting

For some reason I’ll never understand, copywriting is not given the attention it deserves. All the blogs you read will tell you about conversion rate optimization (CRO), but never even mention copywriting.

I’ve used many copywriting principles in this very article.

Can you spot them?

Leave a comment below and if you can identify any of them I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.

Your website lives and dies with the copy you put on it. Before a user takes in your design, the overall user experience, and ease of navigation; they look at what you say.

Your copy is truly the tip of the spear.

If you don’t let them know what you’re offering within a few moments, they’re gone and probably won’t ever return.

Copywriting split tests examples

14.9% increase in conversions by changing a single word.

There are a few amazing blogs, books, and courses dedicated to teaching you the art of copywriting.

Daniel Ndukwu. Entrepreneur, Nomad, Teacher, Learner, Optimist, Content marketer, and Founder of The Experiment. When he's not here he's probably out drinking a bottle of Sancerre or plotting world domination. Enjoy his unconventional method of marketing and doing everything else for that matter.

Its a MONSTER blog post or what intellectuals call an Authority Blog post.
Daniel every time I visit your website I come away with something new to implement and thats exactly what a post is meant to do.

First I love Coschedule & Portent Tool & I have created a whole Monster blog post on these & more coming out First Week of January so I will definitely Link it to This as a resource if you don’t mind!

I find the iaminstitute title resource a lil unstable lately. Many times you check the link and you find te website isnt available. I am not sure if they are updating or something! I still use it in conjunction with the Coschedule & Portent tools And also one that cranks out Jazzy headlines or titles called tweakyourbiz.com I have found my Blog posts attract website traffic & more readers when I use these resources together!

Bookmarking this for further dissecting and implementation. sharing too 🙂 Thank You Daniel!

I sure loved creating the post on how to Create Infinite Blog Posts in 24 hours and I believe it does compliment this post on Attracting traffic to our posts, In Fact some of the resources do help with content creation which is awesome.

Wow Daniel what an awesome post. You provided so much valuable content that I booked marked you post for future reference as well.
I love the Forum value your provided that is something I will definitely look into as well as joining blogging communities I’m sure that is also very helpful in learning additional tips and tricks although I have to say you covered such an amazing amount of value. thanks so much for sharing such awesome content Daniel

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Oh goodness this is a lot of good information. Could you make a quick post with highlights from this post? I’m sure it will do very well, and I’d love to refer back to it and feature it on my blog for my momma bloggers!

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